One big reason for the airport congestion, of course, is that the runways are cluttered up with planes making trips of only a few hundred miles. This has been a problem for quite a while. Periodically, it gets so bad that the media gets all excited and sometimes (last summer, for instance) the President makes a statement deploring it. Since the current president is a knucklehead, it apparently hasn’t occurred to him to get behind a revival of the passenger rail system. But Mr. Bush is apparently not the only elected knucklehead in this country, because absolutely nobody is talking about this.

Tons of people travel between New York, Washington D.C., and Boston by plane, even though it takes only slightly longer to drive. The only other options are bus (sucks) and Amtrak. Amtrak only runs a handful of trains per day, so the schedule is unlikely to work out in your favor. And the laughable “Acela” high-speed option is far more expensive than most plane trips and doesn’t even save much time.